When I Write, by Gloria Anzaldua

“When I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart– a Nahuatl concept. My soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remaking and giving birth to itself through the creative act. It is constantly remaking and giving birth to itself through my body. It is this learning to live with la Coatlicue that transforms living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experience. It is always a path/state to something else.”

Gloria Anzaldua, a self-described “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist,” was born to sharecropper/field-worker parents on September 26th, 1942 in South Texas Rio Grande Valley. During her lifetime, Anzaldua won numerous awards for her work, such as the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award for Haciendo Cara, an NEA Fiction Award, the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for This Bridge Called My Back, and the Sappho Award of Distinction. In addition, her text Borderlands/La Frontera was selected by the Literary Journal as one of the 38 Best Books of 1987.
This bio excerpt was taken from Voices from the Gaps.